Kelly McGonigal Archives - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™

February 8, 2015

Why Sucking At Meditation Rocks

From the archives! I talk about meditation a LOT, so it seemed like this post, originally published on August 2, 2012, was due for re-publication. In Your Big, Bold, Creative Life Academy meditation comes up in almost every class, because it is just such an astonishingly powerful tool to help lean into fear, avoid getting sucked into distractions, practice self-compassion, and so much more! I hope I inspire you to try it yourself, if you aren’t already a meditator. ~Melissa

I am a meditation moron.

I can’t [Read more…]

January 15, 2013

My 3 Most Transformative Reads of 2012

I read a fair number of books each year, but it’s not always that I can say a book is truly transformative. 2012 was a rich year in that regard.

Last year I read such outstanding and highly regarded tomes as The Gifts of Imperfection and Daring Greatly, by (my hero extraordinaire) Brené Brown, Linchpin, by Seth Godin, Drive, by Daniel Pink, and a good chunk of Flow, the classic book on the psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (I confess I’ve yet to finish that one…)

Those are each excellent books, which I highly recommend (anything by Brené Brown especially!) But if I were to pick just three books that I read in 2012, which effected the most transformation in my own life, it would be the following:

1. The Willpower Instinct

By Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D.

Kelly McGonigal’s book, based on her Stanford University course, The Science of Willpower, has dramatically changed the way I do, well, pretty much everything.

I am so in love with this book, in fact, that starting next week, I’m leading a reading circle inside my Creative Ignition Club, to work through the book again in a group, one chapter at a time. (Wanna join us? I really want other creatives to benefit from the lessons in this book, so I’m opening the clubhouse this week — come on in!)

I also signed up for The Science of Willpower class through Stanford Continuing Studies, to immerse myself more deeply in the subject, and learn about the latest research that has been done since the book was written. (The first class was last night, and it was great fun.)

You may think of willpower as “crunch down and power through,” which sounds about as appealing as slogging through a vat of oatmeal. But that’s not actually what McGonigal is talking about.

Willpower, as McGonigal defines it, is much more nuanced than that:

Willpower is the ability to choose what matters most [to you], even when it’s difficult, or some part of you wants to do something else.

In other words, it’s the ability to choose the “right thing,” even when that little “devil on your shoulder” is persuading you to choose the other thing:

To choose to work on your novel/painting/blog/work deadline instead of falling into a social media black hole, for example.

To pick the salad instead of the chocolate chip cookie.

To take a walk instead of lighting up a cigarette.

To say, “Thank you, sweetie,” instead of snapping, “Why the hell didn’t you do X??”

Get the picture? Self-control may sound like the purview of the uptight and righteous, but in fact it’s something we all need, just to get through the day, let alone to do our best work! And wouldn’t it be nice for those “right choices” to be easier?

What I love about The Willpower Instinct, is that it uses the latest in neuroscience (and some truly fascinating, engaging, and entertaining studies!) to offer up a plethora of small changes you can make in order to do just that: make it easier to make that right choice.

For example: did you know that sleep deprivation — for even a single night — dramatically decreases willpower?

Yep. Just one night of shortchanging your sleep over-activates the part of your brain that’s responsible for impulsive action, and under-activates the part of your brain that’s responsible for self-control.

And the reverse is true: getting good quality, adequate, consistent sleep amounts to good care for your brain that turns on your best self.

Kinda pumps up my motivation to get back on my Great Bedtime Experiment wagon…

And did you know that even five or ten minutes of daily meditation can not just strengthen your willpower, but also increase the amount of sleep you get? A double-whammy willpower booster! (And btw, it was a small section in The Willpower Instinct that strengthened my resolve to keep up my nascent meditation practice, which has now become a fixture of my days.)

These two tips alone have been hugely helpful in my productivity, but that’s just a fraction of the good stuff inside The Willpower Instinct. Seriously, this book is the bomb.

Buy it, but take McGonigal’s advice and read it over time, a chapter per week. Better yet, read it with a group, like I’m doing inside the Creative Ignition Club starting next week. You can blast through the book in a weekend (like I did…), but there’s just too much material to fully absorb and process that way.

If you’re like me, you may need willpower to hold off on reading it, though. 😉

2. Mindset

By Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Hat tip to Tara Mohr for recommending this book, which finally explained, among other things, why I’ve struggled with perfectionism, why for many years I could never earn more than “just enough to get by,” and why I gave up writing for fifteen years.

The common denominator?

My mindset.

Turns out there are two different mindsets or belief systems that people walk around with:

The fixed mindset — in which you believe that your intelligence, talents, skills, abilities and personality are inborn and nothing you can do will change them, or..

The growth mindset — in which you believe that your intelligence, talents, skills, abilities and personality are the result of your effort, and therefore changeable.

A simple thing, really, but with enormous implications for success, failure, and self-esteem in all areas of life.

It also turns out that praising children for their inborn “talent” or “intelligence” (as my parents and teachers did, with all good intentions) can have the very counterproductive result of making them resistant to trying anything where there’s any risk of failure. After all, if they fail, it would prove that they aren’t as talented or intelligent as they’ve been made out to be — better to just not try at all.

Oh. My. God. That pretty much describes a lot of my life.

Not in every area, for sure, otherwise I’d never have accomplished anything! One can have a fixed mindset in some areas of life and a growth mindset in others.

What’s really interesting is how, now that I understand the concept of fixed vs. growth mindsets, I have been discovering more areas in my life where I was unconsciously operating under a fixed mindset.

For years I thought my inability to earn more than “just enough to get by” was because I lacked the “moneymaking gene.”

Nope. Fixed mindset, baby.

Otherwise known as a self-installed glass ceiling.

The ability to earn a good income is a skill that can be learned. Some people may have more of an innate facility than others, but nobody is born knowing how to make money. We all have to learn it from somewhere. Once I realized that it was a fixed mindset — not some innate flaw or lack — that had been keeping me stuck, I changed my mindset and set out to learn!

For fifteen years I didn’t write, because I thought I just lacked the “writing gene.” I thought I just sucked.

Nope. You got it: fixed mindset.

The ability to write well is also a skill that can be learned. Again, some people may have more of an innate facility, but it’s the work of writing — including allowing oneself to write badly! — that turns one into a writer.

Dweck offers a plethora of examples of people operating with fixed and growth mindsets, from the worlds of art, sports, and business, proving that “native talent” is not ever the determining factor in a person’s ultimate success. And she offers suggestions for how to change your own mindset.

At 246 pages, this book packs a powerful punch. It might even change your life.

3. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

By John J. Ratey, M.D.

The tagline on the cover of this book is, “Supercharge Your Mental Circuits to Beat Stress, Sharpen Your Thinking, Lift Your Mood, Boost Your Memory, and Much More.”

“Really?” I thought. “Just with exercise?” But I kept stumbling across references to Ratey’s book, so rather reluctantly added it to my reading list. Then one of my most transformative reads from 2011, Uncertainty, by Jonathan Fields (highly recommended!), made reading Spark an imperative:

First, read [this book]. It will open your eyes to the importance of exercise in every aspect of your life as nothing you’ve read before has done. It will clarify the role exercise plays in preserving and even bolstering your ability to lean into uncertainty, fear, and anxiety as you strive to build something extraordinary.

That’s quite and endorsement, so I finally, rather dutifully placed my order on Amazon.

Within the first few pages I was captivated. And suddenly, after years of always-intending-but-never-quite-managing to “get more exercise,” I was making aerobic exercise a priority in my life!

Honestly, I was kind of stunned. As a former bulimic with a history of major body-image issues, I’d always thought that appearance would be my greatest motivator to get on the damn exercise bike (or treadmill, or outdoors, or whatever). I may be recovered from bulimia, but I’m still a more vain than I’d like to admit.

It turns out I care a lot more about my brain — my intelligence, my creativity, my longevity, my mood — than I care about my looks (which, I’ll admit, is kinda gratifying to know…) Ratey’s book offered me just the motivation I needed to get off my butt.

Have I exercised every single day since reading Spark? No. But I have gotten a decent dose of aerobic exercise (generally 30-45 minutes) more often than not since I’ve been keeping track.

Not every day, but most days.

Considering that the only exercise I was getting before reading Spark was yoga (granted, a pretty intense form of yoga) twice a week (on a good week), this is a dramatic change!

Is it what Ratey recommends as optimal? No, I still have a way’s to go, but hell, you’ve got to start somewhere! As I always say, baby steps, baby. And as an ex-boyfriend of mine liked to say, “better is better.”

This is definitely better.

I finally moved exercise higher up on my priorities because Ratey’s arguments were just too all-encompassing to ignore. Spark offers fascinating examples of the power of exercise to enhance learning; decrease stress, anxiety and depression; minimize attention deficit problems; help beat addiction; deal with hormone problems; and slow/reverse the aging process and dementia. The studies and examples he cites are mind boggling.

Wow! This is powerful stuff! It sure got me to transform my own life.

(Now if only I could get MB to read it…)

Wrapping Up

So that’s it. My three most transformative reads from 2012. If you’ve read any of them, what did you think? Did you find them transformative as well?

What were your most transformative reads last year?

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

December 23, 2012

A Self-Compassionate Look At My Biggest Fails & Insights in 2012

Of course the year is not over yet, but as New Year’s Eve approaches, like many people I find myself reflecting more and more on the past almost-twelve months.

That’s what I love about holidays and other annual events — they offer another opportunity to mark my progress, notice what has gone well and what I’d like to change.

One of my most important insights of the past year — or, at least, an insight that I made a conscious, ongoing effort to pay attention to — is this simple formula:

Self-awareness + self-compassion = the key to everything good. (Click to tweet this!)

I believe this more and more with each passing day.

Here, then, are some of the lessons learned from endeavoring to practice self-compassion and self-awareness this past year.

At the start of 2012 I chose three theme words for my year: Self-Compassion, Practice and Untangle. I started the year with a powerhouse challenge that was emblematic of all three: my Great Bedtime Experiment, in which I managed to get myself to bed, lights out, by 11:00pm every night for a full month.

Given that 2:00am was my previous set-point, this was a three-hour change, and wow, was that hard!

But it was worth it. The results were nothing short of amazing. I discovered how very much my habit of staying up into the wee hours to get “just one more thing” done affects me — physically, mentally and emotionally.

When I get to bed early:

My vision isn’t as blurry (damn the aging process for stripping me of my former hawk eyes!)

My mood is much more positive.

I think more clearly.

My body just feels better.

I have better posture.

I’m less likely to succumb to distractions and temptations of all kinds.

Plus, since one of my most creative times is in the morning, I tend to create more!

And yet, am I still getting to bed at 11:00pm? Errrr… Um… That would be a no.

Falling off the Early Bedtime Wagon (again and again) has been one of my major fails in 2012. But it has also been the source of another one of my most useful insights:

The most important practice we can engage in is the practice of getting back on the wagon. (Click to tweet this!)

I’ve gotten back on (and off and on and off and on) many wagons this year, and this saying has become something of a personal motto. When I shared it on a call with Patti Digh in the VerbTribe course I took back in May and June, Patti’s response was perfect:

Yes, and you’d better make sure it’s a really short wagon.

Indeed.

Rule #4 of my 10 Rules for the Creative Sandbox (one of the accomplishments from 2012 that I’m most pleased with) is Think tiny (and daily) for a reason. It’s a helluva lot easier to get back on the wagon with a 15-minutes-a-day commitment (short wagon) than a two-hours-a-week one (tall wagon).

But this is also where the formula above comes in really handy:

Self-awareness means noticing how I feel when I fall off the wagon of one of my goals or commitments, and how that compares to how I feel when I’m on track.

Self-compassion means not beating myself up for blunders, but treating myself with love and forgiveness.

This didn’t come easily to me at first. I’ve had lots more practice at beating myself up than treating myself with compassion.

The many years when I was bulimic, trapped by self-hate and a very distorted body image, were a broken record of “Oh my god, you blew it again. You suck! You suck! You suck!”

It’s ironic that this is how we too often react when we confront a willpower failure, because as Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal shares in her outstanding book, The Willpower Instinct (one of my most favorite finds of 2012), people who beat themselves up after a “fail” are dramatically less likely to succeed in their goals than those who forgive themselves.

Self-compassion, it turns out, is the strongest indicator of success with any willpower challenge. (Click to tweet this!)

(And btw, I’m planning on running a Willpower Instinct book group/study group/e-course early next year, probably in February. Creative Ignition Club members will have full access for free, and I just opened the doors of the Club to new members via monthly subscription for the first time, but only through December 31, so you might want to check it out.)

The first of my three words for 2012 has proven to be even more profound than I anticipated. I’m even considering recycling “self-compassion” as a theme word for 2013. It seems one can never have enough self-compassion, and the more consciously I practice it, the deeper and wider the transformations ripple out through my life.

I have also come to see that the second of my three words, Practice, is inextricably tied to the notion of self-compassion.

One of the most impactful things I did this year was to sign up for Susan Piver‘s Open Heart Project back in… March? April?

After resisting meditation for many years (I couldn’t seem to do it “right,” so I always gave up), I was turned onto Susan Piver through an interview in Jennifer Louden and Michele Lisenbury Christensen‘s (highly recommended) TeachNow program (for which I am a proud affiliate, fyi).

Something about Piver’s spirit spoke to me, so I clicked through and signed up to get her twice-weekly OHP newsletters, each with a ten-minute meditation video.

“Ten minutes? Hell, even I could tolerate that,” I thought.

Remember Creative Sandbox Rule #4, “Think tiny (and daily)“? Yep. A tiny daily meditation commitment — just ten minutes a day for the month of April to start — has been key for my developing an ongoing, consistent, sustainable meditation practice.

It took a few weeks to stop seeing meditation as something not-so-fun that I “had” to do, but just a couple of weeks after that I noticed I didn’t want to not meditate! I looked forward to my daily sessions! In the past six months, I’ve missed a total of five times (and that includes my week away at Jazz Camp West in June, and two weeks in Istanbul in October)!

Not bad!

It helped that I discovered, thanks to The Willpower Instinct again, that meditation is the perfect willpower booster for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s a way to practice both self-compassion and getting back on the wagon over and over and over again, every single day.

As McGonigal writes:

Most new meditators make [the mistake of thinking they’re wasting their time if they aren’t able to focus perfectly on the breath], but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective.

What I do in meditation — noticing when I get distracted and gently returning my focus to my breath, over and over and over — is exactly what I need in real life: to catch myself moving away from a goal and then point myself back at it.

I’ve noticed how this practice of treating myself with forgiveness and self-compassion, and getting back on the wagon, is spreading into every area of my life. Thanks to another wonderful book, Spark: the Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by Dr. John Ratey, I’ve finally gotten back to regular aerobic exercise after many years.

Do I meet my exercise goals (30-60 minutes/day) every day? No. But instead of beating myself up and driving to Krispy Kreme to numb my disappointment in myself, I chalk it up to being human and re-commit to trying again tomorrow.

I used to use a multi-commitment wall chart to check off whether or not I’d accomplished each of my goals (which I offer to subscribers to my insiders newsletter as a special bonus — sign up in the form at the upper right of this page). Now I use a (free) iPhone app to keep track of my various commitments, and over the past three weeks I’ve checked off that I exercised thirteen times.

Not nearly as good as I would like, granted, but waaaaaay better than what I would have done if I didn’t have the goal in the first place, and if I didn’t practice forgiveness and self-compassion!

And as an ex-boyfriend of mine always liked to say, better is better.

So what’s the upshot here?

I started off this post with the intention of writing about my greatest fails, greatest accomplishments, greatest insights from 2012, and some great ideas for 2013. Typical of me, my eyes were bigger than my stomach (as it were). Here I am at almost 1500 words, and I’ve only covered a fraction of what I intended.

Which is, appropriately, another one of my 2012 lessons (finally) learned (mostly): what I think I can accomplish in a day or a week or a single blog post is invariably much more than I actually can.

Okay, perhaps I learned this a long time ago conceptually, but what’s different now is that I’m finally also learning to stop resisting, and just adjust to reality. (Okay, well, let’s just say I’m getting better at it.)

It’s a much gentler, more self-compassionate way to live.

Isn’t it cool how everything intertwines?

Self-compassion is linked to self-awareness.

Practicing meditation is a way to practice self-compassion and self-awareness.

Tiny (and daily) commitments are a way to practice practicing; noticing how I feel when I fall off the wagon is self-awareness; and getting back on with forgiveness is self-compassion.

Self-compassion means self-acceptance, which allows for more self-compassion.

I’m still processing the multitude of ways these concepts are playing out in my life. I can tell you without hesitation that keeping self-compassion front-of-mind during this past year has been transformative.

I’m looking forward to practicing even deeper self-compassion in 2013. I hope you’ll join me.

Only until December 31…

We’re practicing self-compassion and creating up a storm inside the Creative Ignition Club! How? Sharing our stories. Posting our progress. Sharing our commitments and lovingly holding each other accountable.

We’re making art, and writing, and trying things that scare us, and clearing clutter in our lives.

All of which is just sooooo much easier and more fun when there are a bunch of really awesome people cheering you on!

Erin wrote: “I can’t say this enough: THANK YOU.”

Laura wrote: “”To you and everyone here – your stories do enter into my psyche and continue to help shape how I go about my life. So, to everyone sharing stories here, thank you ~”

Come join the fun! You can get inside for just $18. The doors open just a few times a year, and right now they’re open until December 31. Click here to read all about it.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

May 11, 2012

How Your Optimism Might Be Hurting You – The Willpower Instinct

I’m reading this great book right now, The Willpower Instinct, by Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal — research for my upcoming program to get women creating, Time to Glow.

There’s such great stuff inside, this book should be required reading for any creative. (In fact, I’m thinking of creating a online course/study group/support group to dive deeper into the book, but that’s down the road…)

Anyone who has a calling to create faces a daily choice about whether to spend their limited time and energy on what really matters to them… or on the bazillion other things that pull on their proverbial sleeves. With so many distractions in our lives, learning to boost and leverage willpower is an essential skill.

In one of the early chapters of the book, Dr. McGonigal looks at why we keep putting off the thing we really want to do. (Sound familiar?)

You know how most exercise equipment people buy ends up gathering dust? Well, two marketing professors were curious about the mistakes consumers make in predicting how much they’ll use their exercise equipment, and decided to study this phenomenon.

They asked a whole bunch of people to predict, “How many times per week (on average) will you exercise in the next month?”

Then they asked a whole bunch of OTHER people the very same question, but with one important preface: “In an ideal world, how many times per week will you exercise in the next month?”

Turns out that everyone assumes an ideal world — the groups’ estimates were no different.

McGonigal writes:

We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do [and I would add — what we want, but are not quite yet willing or ready to do] today. We feel justified in putting it off, confident that our future behavior will more than make up for it.

It gets more interesting, though.

Perhaps, thought the researchers, prompting more realistic self-predictions would make a difference.

Nope. When the experimenters gave people the explicit instructions, “Please do not provide an idealistic prediction, but rather the most realistic prediction of your behavior that you can,” those people showed even more optimism about their behavior and reported the highest estimates yet!

Not surprisingly, when the researchers invited these optimists back for a reality check, they reported that the number of times they had actually exercised was lower than predicted.

“People had made their predictions for an ideal world,” writes McGonigal, “but lived through two weeks in the real world.”

And it doesn’t stop there. McGonigal continues:

The experimenters then asked these same people to predict how many times they would exercise in the next two weeks. Ever the optimists, they made estimates even higher than their initial predictions, and much heigher than their actual reports from the past two weeks. It’s as if they took their original predicted average seriously, and were assigning their future selves extra exercise to make up for their ‘unusually poor’ performance. Rather than view the past two weeks as reality, and their original estimates as an unrealistic view, they viewed the past two weeks as an anomaly.

In other words, people use positive expectations — optimism — to justify present inaction.

Kinda depressing, huh?

Thankfully, there are tricks for handling the down side of optimism.

Behavioral economist, Howard Rachlin, offers one: when you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself.

Huh?

Rachlin did studies with smokers, asking them just to try to smoke the same number of cigarettes every day, not to try to smoke less. Guess what? Those smokers actually decreased their overall smoking.

Writes McGonigal:

Rachlin argues that this works because the smokers are deprived of the usual cognitive crutch of pretending that tomorrow will be different. Every cigarette becomes not just one more smoked today, but one more smoked tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. This adds new weight to every cigarette, and makes it much harder to deny the health consequences of a single smoke.

So how does this apply to your creative thing?

Just this: aim to reduce the variability of your creative practice. Instead of asking “Would I rather do this today or tomorrow?” ask yourself, “Do I really want the consequences of always putting off my passion?”

Then let me know how it goes.

Tell me, how will you apply this willpower lesson to your own life?

xo, Melissa <3

If you’re ready to stop putting off your passion, join me in my program for women, Time to Glow, starting May 24.

We’ll cover more tools for turbo-charging your willpower, for moving forward despite fear & doubt, for taming that Inner Critic Gremlin grumbling away at you that “you’re not good enough” or “you don’t deserve to create” or “everything/everyone else is more important,” and a whole lot more.

If you’re ready to create what’s calling you to be created and share it with the world before it’s too late, click here to join a circle of amazing, generous, warm-hearted women. We’re waiting to welcome you.

Early bird pricing ends at 9pm PDT tonight, May 11. Click here to learn more about the program and to take your place in it.